7 Possible First-Line Coronavirus Treatments

According to the Situation Report on Coronavirus Disease by the World Health Organization, coronavirus has been spreading at an exponential rate and is arriving in new countries all the time.

While there’s some evidence that China may have successfully stopped the exponential spread in their own country, there’s a real chance that coronavirus could spread rapidly inside of new countries.

Fortunately, top scientists and doctors around the world have been studying the disease and finding ways to treat it. Promising leads suggest that a cure may be discovered within a year or so, but there are also some coronavirus treatments you can use now, some of them within your own home.

So read on to learn about how to treat coronavirus if you or a loved one is infected.

Coronavirus Treatments

Scientists are working hard around the world on a vaccine that can get rid of coronavirus as decisively and completely as we’ve already gotten rid of polio. Do coronavirus treatments exist yet? President Donald Trump has spoken optimistically about when the vaccine will be ready, but estimates suggest it may be at least a year.

Until then, scientists have been trying out many medicines to see which ones can help cure coronavirus once it’s already infected someone. Favilavir is the best so far, with a few others showing promising results.

Coronavirus resembles a flu in many ways, so normal fever medicines and other care techniques can work as treatments for coronavirus, helping to speed recovery and keep the disease from becoming more serious. For most people, coronavirus will just look like a cold or a flu.

1. Favilavir

Favilavir is an experimental drug developed by Zhijiang Hisun Pharmaceutical. It has recently been approved to be tested as a cure for coronavirus. Clinical trials will be beginning soon.

Favilavir has already been used in the past to treat the common flu and is the most promising of the three drugs that look like they may be effective coronavirus treatments.

Some trials have already been conducted with Favilavir, and it produces some very promising results. Fortunately, the drug has also shown to cause very few serious side effects.

2. Chloroquine

Chloroquine is an old medicine that has traditionally been used to treat cases of malaria. In the case of malaria, chloroquine stops parasites from growing in the red blood cells in your blood. But there are also some indicators that it could help stop the growth of coronavirus as well.

Chloroquine has been given the go ahead to receive further study in the Hunan province of China.

3. Gilead’s Remdesivir

Gilead’s drug has been pushed to be used in medical trials in more than 10 hospitals and other medical centers. It is being studied in Wuhan itself, where coronavirus first started.

The US National Institute of Health has already found that remdesivir (Gilead’s drug) may be able to keep Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus from infecting organisms.

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus is not “the” coronavirus, but it is a strain from the same family that tends to infect monkeys. The hope is that the drug will be similarly successful as a treatment for the coronavirus spreading through human populations today.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has demonstrated interest in remdesivir as well, and they have submitted an application for a patent on the drug.

4. Fever Medicines

As we saw before, a coronavirus is mild for most people. Within a few days of being infected, a person will generally start showing symptoms typical in type and degree to those you would get from a cold.

Your nose could run, you might get a cough, and you might feel tired. Only in rare cases would you even get a fever.

For the vast majority of cases that are mild like this, treatments for coronavirus consist of taking some bedrest, making sure to stay well-hydrated, and using normal pain reliever and fever medicines. That’s how to treat coronavirus in the vast majority of cases.

Ibuprofen and acetaminophen can be great tools to help relieve any discomfort or pain as well as bring down a fever in the unlikely case that you get one.

5. Masks Only For the Infected

Some people have been buying up masks and wearing them to avoid ever getting infected in the first place. Unfortunately, this strategy can actually do more harm than good. Not only does it take away all the masks on the market so that people who really need them can’t get them, but it can even make you more likely to get infected.

Coronavirus is not an airborne disease. Instead, it is spread through droplets that come from the mouth or nose of an infected person. Typically, you can catch the coronavirus if you touch some of these droplets, wherever they may fall, and then touch your nose, mouth, or eyes. That is how the disease gets in.

Masks won’t do anything to keep droplets from getting on your hands, and they won’t help you avoid touching your face to transfer the droplets. In fact, masks may make you touch your face more, as you constantly have to adjust your mask.

6. Avoiding Infection

Since coronavirus usually has to get on your hands before it can infect you, make sure that you frequently wash your hands, especially before eating.

Try to avoid touching your face and be careful about getting close to people who are already infected.

7. Avoid Antibiotics

As you can tell from the name, coronavirus is a virus, which means it’s not a bacteria. Antibiotics are only for bacteria and cannot help, not even a little, with killing a virus.

Keep Your Home and Body Clean

We hope you learned something helpful about coronavirus treatments. To learn more about all kinds of medicine as well as how you can conveniently order them, check out our other pages!